Panic! at the Disco, Patrick Stump, and Foxy Shazam at Starland Ballroom

Saed Hindash/The Star-LedgerPatrick Stump, once and future frontman of Fall Out Boy, doing his best Martin Fry impression.

"Not many people," said Patrick Stump, "were willing to take a chance on me playing funk songs in a teal suit."

Thus did Stump, the unlikely support act, humbly thank Panic! at the Disco for the opportunity to open Friday night's show. The crowd at Starland Ballroom was a young one, but the role reversal was lost on nobody. It was Stump's old group, Fall Out Boy, that discovered Panic! and gave the Las Vegas band a national platform before they'd even played their first show. Now Fall Out Boy -- one of the most popular mainstream rock bands of the '00s -- is on indefinite hiatus, and Panic! at the Disco has become a reliably entertaining live attraction. Patrick Stump isn't exactly starting over, because he's got way too many fans for that. The pop-punk veteran is stepping out on his own, with a Howard Jones haircut and some Purple Rain dance moves, asking for a second act. "I don't have to prove myself to you," he sang on "Cryptozoology."

But everything Stump did at Starland suggested that was an awfully disingenuous thing for him to sing. He was the frontman of Fall Out Boy, but he always stood in the shadow of bassist Pete Wentz, who wrote the group's lyrics and became its face. Stump crashed through his 45 minute set like a man fleeing from the underbrush of his own history into a past shared by everybody else. He opened with a brief version of David Bowie's "Let's Dance," he pounded a drumkit during an attenuated cover of Phil Collins' "in the Air Tonight," and he bounced through several danceable originals from his recently-released "Soul Punk" that could have been yanked from an MTV playlist in 1983. His is new wave reimagined as a ride on the bumper cars; punchy songs colliding into each other with Stump slamming hard on the accelerator (and occasionally getting stuck in a corner he couldn't get out of.)

Brendon Urie, frontman of Panic! at the Disco, never seemed as unsure or vulnerable as the teal-suited Stump. But he, too, is a Daltrey looking to expunge the memory of a Townshend. Guitarist Ryan Ross wrote most of the band's first two albums and helped Panic! establish a sound and look as indebted to vaudeville, circus acts, and musical theater as it was to contemporary pop. On "Pretty. Odd.," the band's expansive second record, Ross pushed Panic! toward orchestrated classic rock of the '60s and '70s: "Sgt. Pepper," Chicago, Queen, and especially ELO. After that, Ross split the group over creative differences, taking the bassist with him, stranding Urie with drummer Spencer Smith.

Panic!'s tight, kinetic headlining set swerved around "Pretty. Odd.," instead drawing connections between the band's bestselling debut and this year's ornate "Vices and Virtues," which was mostly penned by Urie. Songs from "Vices" were among the show's best, especially the electro-pop tornado "Memories" and the uncharacteristically sweet "Always." And like the new album, the show seemed designed to demonstrate that it was always Urie, and not Ross, who was the soul of Panic! at the Disco. Urie played piano, organ, a floor tom, folky acoustic guitar and ringing electric, and executed an awe-inspiring David Lee Roth-style front flip from the drum riser and sung a note flawlessly a second after he hit the ground. The frontman has a broad, smooth, mock-operatic voice -- something like Morrissey minus any trace of pain or self-doubt -- and he pushed it into territory not yet explored on Panic! discs. He incorporated a low growl and a bloodcurdling hair-metal shriek into his already wide vocal repertoire. Yet unlike Ryan Ross, around whom an angelic atmosphere often hung, Urie can seem insincere and smug, more interested in showing off his chops than in really connecting. Between songs, he encouraged an audience of mostly-underage girls to smoke marijuana and have sex with strangers; if he was trying to convince us of his toughness, songs like the Duran Duran-sounding "Ballad of Mona Lisa" undermined his claim.

Like Panic!, opening act Foxy Shazam is an ambitious pop group with an ear for classic sounds and an eye on the teen market. The band's shows, which combine punk energy with the big arrangements of classic rock, are explosions of sweat and steam, and can be a thrill to experience. But Foxy frontman Eric Sean Nally is earning himself a reputation as one of the most thin-skinned figures in contemporary pop. Nally wasted a good five minutes of his 30 minute set with a rambling complaint about a bad review he'd gotten, and then nearly stopped "The Only Way to My Heart.." to curse the venue's monitors. At the end of the set, he promised Starland he wouldn't be back, threw down the microphone, and stormed offstage. (He did something quite similar at the Wellmont Theater last year.) Foxy Shazam could be one of the best live bands in America, but that's not going to happen until Nally gets that chip off of his shoulder.